The Parallels Between Corporate Training and Modern Entertainment

    

When I first heard that Martin Scorsese’s new instant-classic movie, “The Irishman” was over three corporate-training-entertainmentand a half hours long it reminded me of the good old days of training when you had five days to tell a story and help participants develop the skills and tools they need to be more effective. But like many longer movie classics those days are long gone, replaced by requests for shorter training programs, self-paced learning, and short bursts of experiential learning that can be accomplished as quickly as possible.

Many of Scorsese’s classic movies such as Goodfellas, Casino, and The King of Comedy were full-length shows that were viewed on the big screens in movie theaters.  From a historical perspective, The Irishman was the first major movie that was designed and distributed by Netflix via streaming which brings up another interesting parallel between training and entertainment. Much like what’s happening with the continued evolution of “chunking” and “micro-ization of learning,” a significant number of people watched the Irishman on their smartphones or tablet devices.

The other interest observation is that much of today’s better entertainment is actually limited run (10 episode per season) television shows instead of full-length feature movies. As we all know, there’s just so much story you can tell in a typical two- hour movie, but there are rich, elaborate, and well-developed stories you can tell in ten one-hour episodes.  It would have been virtually impossible to make a movie version of “The Crown”, but Netflix is doing a spectacular job telling the story in one-hour episodes spread out over multiple seasons.  Season three, episode three of The Crown (Aberfan) is one of the most compelling hours of entertainment you will ever see. It’s good enough to stand alone as a separate lesson of the human condition and the fact that it’s seen through the lens of the Crown makes it even more fascinating.

While we are in a golden age of entertainment and technology, the point I am making is that there are things we can learn from the entertainment world that can be applied to the world of talent development.

Learning from Entertainment for Learning

As mentioned earlier, there are interesting similarities in terms of customer demands, technology, culture, expectations, and application.  Here are 3 recommendations for what can work in today’s learning environment as taken from the entertainment world:

Micro-Simulations

Interactive case studies that come to life in the form of short bursts of learning. By way of example, take the Manufacturing company who just built a Micro-Simulation engine that “plays” one-hour micro-cases for the R&D leaders to learn about business from. Participants enter 6-8 key variables and then experience the potential outcomes. Each micro-cased is modeled after real-world scenarios so the discussions are rich and deep.

Intensity of Content

As I mentioned earlier, the third episode and the third season of The Crown was intense. And memorable. And so are some of the other newer streaming shows including Disney+’s, The Mandalorian which has captured the hearts and minds of millions of fans by introducing “Baby Yoda.”  To put that in perspective, there are more discussions and mentions of Baby Yoda on Twitter than all Democratic Presidential Candidates combined.

The application to talent development is that the content that is being presented as part of the learning must also be intense and interesting. Boring lectures and PowerPoints are simply not going to make it.

What’s Old is New

CBS Entertainment has made major investments in their Star Trek portfolio with “Discovery” (set ten years before the Original Star Trek) and now in 2020, “Picard” which picks up the trials and tribulations of Jean-Luc Picard 20 years after the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Both of these series play on tried and tested characters but update them and modernize them using the most modern technologies in the entertainment world.

From a learning perspective, a lot of the core content that makes up most leadership and sales training isn’t new. Like these new Star Trek shows, we can take great content and re-purpose and update it to make it relevant and applicable to the needs of the modern workforce.

New Call-to-action

Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.